If
the rules of English and sound reasoning are applied to the meaning of the
Constitution, then no other conclusion can be legitimately drawn. The presence of “under God” in the existing
Pledge is unquestionably unconstitutional.
The politicians, lawyers, and justices who serve theocracy’s agenda
strive to convince us otherwise, but their grasp of English terminology is not
superior to my own. Where these people
are concerned, far too many brazenly seek to convince us that the words of the
Constitution and the phrase “under God” mean things altogether different from
what they actually do.
The
First Amendment reads, “no law respecting an
establishment of religion.” The phrase
“no law” does not admit of any exception.
Deity veneration is ecumenical to religion. The term “God” denotes a singular, all-mighty
supernatural being to the exclusion of all others. It could be debated endlessly whether or not
“God” or any other deity exists either by virtue of the religions established
for defining and worshiping them, or were existent prior to and independent of
the establishment of those religions.
Since deities have no tangible physical substance apart from the
statues, paintings, symbols, signs, and names ascribed to them, the issue
cannot be decisively resolved. In turn,
the monotheistic notion of one almighty supreme deity, versus multiple deities,
versus no deities at all is equally inaccessible to proof. What seems evident is that doctrinal
knowledge and/or worship of God exists only by virtue of the religions
that foster, embrace, and advocate God as their object of veneration. Regardless of the nebulous issues of whether
“God” was a creator, the creator, or just a myth created by the human
architects of religion, worship of “God” is still indisputably an establishment
of religious doctrine. It follows that
the display of artifacts intended to designate, invoke, or venerate God cannot
validly be exempt from the mandates of the First Amendment, neither can the
display of artifacts designating or invoking some other deity. Therefore, no laws are allowable that
endorse belief in God, that endorses the name “God”, or that favor subscription
to the monotheistic ideology that characterizes God worship. Any law that conscripts or compels belief in
or acknowledgment of God, monotheism, or a specific relationship to same, is
unconstitutional by definition. In the
case of the Justice Department and its current leadership, this rather
transparent fact was clearly under dispute.
The
issues surrounding the “under God” pledge involve more than just the First
Amendment. The Sixth Article mandates that, "no religious test shall ever be
required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States". If government is prohibited from requiring a
religious test of the public servant, then it cannot be required of any citizen
or children, and certainly not under the auspicious of the public trust. It follows that belief in “God” or any other
deity is not a requirement of citizenship in good standing. If this fact is not acknowledged as binding
legal truth and so stipulated by the courts, then consideration of the issues
at hand cannot possibly proceed with honor.
If so stipulated, then it is equally as undeniable that a pledge whose wording implies that belief in God is a required,
is plainly unconstitutional for the government to endorse. The fact that people and their children are
“not required” to take the pledge does not dispel that fact. The wording of the pledge mandates allegiance
“under God”, and thus creates a public choice between taking it (pass) versus
dissenting against it (fail). Since no
religious test is required, then Washington clearly and unequivocally has no
business using a federal statute to support a pledge that implicitly amounts to
a religious test. It smacks of
inquisition, witch-hunt, and blatant insurrection against the Supreme Law of
the Nation!
Throughout the
Fernandez dissenting opinion in the Ninth Circuit Court ruling and the
subsequent Justice Department appeal, there was an obsessive leaning on the
evidence of “religious heritage” to justify the presence of “under God” in the pledge. As shown above, the case in favor of God in
the pledge has no standing on the strict grounds of the First Amendment. Without the historical argument, they have no
leg to stand on. The argument for “under
God” consequently leans heavily on various other concessions to religion that
was either properly or improperly allowed, some of which have been
long-standing. In other words, the
argument boils down to an appeal to special instances where the government
relaxed strict enforcement of the First Amendment to allow ceremonial use of
terms like “God” or “Lord” in official proceedings or in the singing of
religiously slanted patriotic songs during public occasions.” As the argument goes, the use of ‘under God’
in the Pledge is consistent with those other established ceremonial usages.” Now, an established tradition in its own
right, the phrase “under God” should be allowed to remain in the Pledge.”
The Justice
Department appeal put forward the divisive notion that if the Ninth Circuit
Court ruling were to stand, then all patriotic songs with “God” in their lyrics
would be inadmissible as well. This
strategy parroted the dissenting opinion of Judge Fernandez. Although a technical potentiality, the notion
borders on the edge of inane. For
sixty-two years leading up to 1954, the pledge did not contain the “under God”
phrase, and the right to sing those patriotic songs was never under
dispute. If the Congress of 1954 and
President Eisenhower had not abused their license by sanctioning the “under
God” pledge, then the notion of endangerment for the songs in question would
not possess even weak political substance.
The
above is just one example how the theocrats labor to confuse the issues. On top of it, the “religious heritage” and
“ceremonial deism” arguments suffer from a defect of classification. There is a substantial difference between
someone offering a religious salutation or prayer as a peripheral act during a
government or public function, versus conscripting the nation’s core oath of
allegiance to the same end. Originally, (prior to 1954) the pledge was unambiguously intended
to focus a collective moment or acknowledgment about our common identify as US
citizens irrespective of religious, cultural, or ethnic differences among us. it intended to
foster a spirit of allegiance to the Nation and its sacred ideals of liberty
and justice. The pledge in its pre-1954 phraseology was a pure
device of ceremonial nationalism. Thereafter,
the pledge was degraded into an oath of religious loyalty by making it a device
of “ceremonial idol worship”. Words are symbols, which are usable in
powerful and compelling ways, and tragically not always to the common
good. The imposition of the "under God" phrase confused the
centrally important issue of allegiance to Nation with the clearly more
arbitrary and personal issue of allegiance to deity and religious ideology.
The
presence of "under God" explicitly mandates the requirement of
allegiance to a monotheistic idol and by common implication, allegiance to the
biblical theocracies that define and sustain worship of God as their central
establishment of religious practice. Clearly, the presence of the words
"under God" in the pledge, amount to a government endorsement of a
specific deity (God) and a specific kind of religious theism (monotheism). Washington does not have the right to
prescribe, even as a ceremonial matter, how many deities there are or are not,
or prescribe allegiance to or under any of them, because that is tampering with
the “free exercise thereof”. By
definition, the usage of the term “God” is singular in import, thus meaning
only one. If it were otherwise, then the
phraseology in the Pledge would be “under the Gods”. The words tell no lie; the phrase “under
God” is an exclusionary mandate to allegiance under the specter of a monotheistic
religions idol.
True
religious freedom cannot possibly exist without the uncensored right to
non-participation in idol veneration.
That constitutionally guaranteed entitlement must not be at the price of
exclusion from the collective sharing of national allegiance. Because of the imposition of the “under God”
phrase, five decades of school children have been coerced into believing they
cannot share in a ritual taking of allegiance to nation without also
supplicating beneath a monotheistic idol in the same breath. Without legitimate grounds for dispute, this
amounts to a government sanctioned impalement of the people and their children
on an exercise in idolatry. With all due
consideration for the issues, one should view the ultimate consequences in
the light of world history, old and new.
The well worn saying, "those who refuse to learn from history’s
mistakes are doomed to repeat them" is heard screaming from the grave of
the Italian scholar who first penned them.
Recall
that in times past, slavery was a way of life among the God loving Bible
thumping settlers of this nation.
Biblical doctrine, all the way back to the Ten Commandments, sanctions
slavery and even George Washington was a slave owner. Are we to shirk off or reinterpret the mandates
of the Thirteenth Amendment and return to those times in the name of satisfying
religious heritage? Perhaps we should
repeal woman’s suffrage in the service of the same male favored religious
dogma. How much are we to believe we owe
in the name of enslavement to the dogmas of old world antiquity? Among other things, the Constitution is an
instrument of protection and liberation from the tyranny of inequitable
cultural, tribal, and familial legacies, but particularly also from enslavement
to the devices of autocratic religion.
The 1954 imposition of the words “under God” runs counter to that
explicit tenet, and therefore was clearly a retrograde act.
“But a
short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish
religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be
his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and
aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.” - Thomas Jefferson 1810
It takes
no special vision to realize that the clergy who preside at government
ceremonies are virtually all exclusive to the biblical faith, all consecrated
to a biblically mandated obsession to world dominion. Further, when it comes to desecrating the
sacred shrines of other faiths and beliefs, both secular and religious, and
visiting inequity on their people, biblical theocracy has a many centuries long
rap sheet! Are matters of fact about the
obsessively exclusionary nature of biblicalism relevant to the case at
hand? If they are not, then appeals to
so-called facts of religious heritage can’t possibly carry currency
either! The notion that a bunch of songs
and religious ceremonies with the term “God” embedded within should trump the
Constitution is ideologically degenerate and politically irresponsible! The Pledge is our core expression of national
allegiance. It must transcend any
concession to religion regardless of what was gotten away with in other more
peripheral instances. From the original
foundation created by Bellamy, the Pledge was exclusively intended as an
affirmation of national allegiance. To
completely fulfill that purpose, the wording must not compromise the standards
of religious neutrality embodied by the Nation’s Supreme Law. The imposition of “under God” poisoned the
common ground of our nationalism in the service of a selfish and power hungry
theocratic agenda.
Not only is
the phrase "under God" a government endorsement of monotheism, but
also a symbolic endorsement of the supremacy of biblical doctrine over the
authority of the Constitution itself.
This is in undeniable conflict with the Sixth Article, which mandates
that the Constitution is the Supreme Law of this nation. These simple facts show that previous court
judgments that endorsed “under God” as a permissible element in our core
ceremony of nationalism are fundamentally flawed and thus untenable by any
legitimate standard.
Up
until 1954, the Pledge proudly sustained a religiously neutral tradition of
allegiance. The corruption that ensured
thereafter was an insurrection plain and simple, one neither constitutionally
admissible nor universally accepted among the Nation’s people. Without doubt, past Presidents and other
notables have at times used the term "god" in their speeches and some
isolated concessions have been made in the service of accommodating old world religious
traditions. However, those same notables
were frequently slave owners or otherwise disinterested in civil parity between
the genders or equality between the races.
Are we to tolerate having the Constitution either congressionally or
judicially thrown in the toilet to elevate an artifact from an objectionable
religious past to a place of sovereign status in defiance of constitutional
law? The American revolution
shucked off servitude to the devine right of kings, but only to be oppressed
anew under a pretense to the devine right of biblicalism?
The
mere fact that the term "god" has been around for a long time, does
not justify special dispensation to inflict via government sanctioned oaths and
pledges. Without apology, the notion is
about the same as suggesting that because slavery had been a long standing
social disease, it should have been allowed to spread wherever it wanted and remain
where ever it was already entrenched.
The notion that it’s permissible to allow religion to entrench itself anywhere
it wants, is dangerous regardless of who endorses the act! This may be hard words to levy against the
popular religion, but anytime we hold any religion, or its institutions and
practitioners, popular or otherwise, to be beyond error, beyond accountability,
above the law, then we court very dangerous ground indeed.
The
Justice Department appeal goes on to cite “our national motto (‘In God We
Trust’)” as further incidental justification for the “under God” in the pledge
(page 6). Wait a minute now; is “In God
We Trust” really our national motto?
Exactly when did it become the national motto? Was it in 1957? What was the national motto before then? On the Great Seal of the Nation we find the
words “E Pluribus Unum”, a motto handed down to us by the likes of Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.
It is a salutation of pluralistic unity with roots from the earliest
days of the Nation. The same phrase is
on the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol Building and graces our money to this
day. In fact, presence of “In God We
Trust” on our currency did not become a government-mandated idolatry until
1957, three years after the defacement of the Pledge. Is this not another hostile eclipsing of a
hard-won secular heritage in the service of un-pluralistic religious interests?
The
ideological cancer embedded in the Department of Justice appeal ran ever
deeper. On page 4, the appeal states,
“In the first case, Lynch v. Donnelly, 465
U.S. 668 (1984), the Supreme Court held that a city did not violate the
Establishment Clause by including a nativity scene as part of its Christmas
display. In upholding the Christmas display, the Court explained that
ceremonial acknowledgments of our nation's religious heritage, including the
reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance, do not "establish a religion
or religious faith, or tend to do so."
Well
of course not. The act of establishment
(as the event of establishing) had occurred long prior. The quote amounts to a play on words, an
obfuscation. The core issue of the
Christmas display had nothing to do with a religion being “established” (as in
being created or founded). The First Amendment
establishment clause pertains just as equally to religions already established
as it does to religions in the process of being established. Both meanings fall under the auspices of
being “an establishment of religion”. To
suggest otherwise, even implicitly, is to do deplorable abuse to the meaning of
the language and to the import of the establishment clause. The issue was not about whether something
was being established or not, but rather about the use of government property
to promote religious ideology. With this
clarification in mind, both instances boil down to an already established
religion (New Testament biblical faith) having its way with the governmental
trust. In other words, the issue was one
of government allowing a religion (an establishment of religion) a special
concession. Can Joe’s nudist retreat put
up a display on government property highlighting their seasonal
celebrations?
For
the sake of argument, I might provisionally agree that forbidding the nativity
scene on public ground during the winter holidays is a little “picayune” in its
constitutional strictness. Still,
agreement even in this case, if at all, would require the stipulation that
analogous privileges are extended to the Native American religions, Wiccans,
Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc, during their holy days. Is such universality of privilege an actual
government protected reality? What
legitimate exclusive need is there for anyone to set up any kind of religious
display on government ground? The truth
is that absolutely none exists. The
faithful are at liberty to use their church property or their own private
property for such purposes. No
legitimate civil injury ensues from prohibiting the peddling of religion on
government property. It simply puts the peddlers where they belong. That is, on the same playing field with all
other religious persuasions, fair and just.
Some people might go so far as to say that the wording of the
establishment clause is not strong enough to adequately deter against the
covetous encroachment of religion.
Still, the real error does not reside with the First Amendment, but
rather with the religious zealots who conspire to contravene the requirement of
government neutrality (as in neither endorsement nor censure) to advance
biblical dogma. With little room for
dispute, biblical doctrine does tend to promote obsessively autocratic and
intrusive tendencies among many of its practitioners.
Instances
like the ones above are significant.
Still, the presence of “under God” in the Pledge outweighs the others in
significance by a huge order of magnitude.
As before, the pledge is the Nation’s core ceremony of allegiance, one
that is invoked in our public schools and now even in the halls of congress as
a daily collective exercise. It is a
primary device of ceremonial nationalism, upon which no religious ideology no
matter how popular has the right to impose its mark. Nor does any court in the land have the right
to endorse or sanction such mark making.
The government does not have the right to snub off minority concerns to
satisfy factional religious interests, no matter how popular they are perceived
to be. It makes mockery of the rule of
law.
It
has become all too convenient for people in influential circles to blow off
objections to the “under God” pledge and other religious oath tests. They declare them to be trivial concessions
to religion and thus fundamentally benign in their impact on human ideation
about matters of deity and religious belief.
If it were truly the case, then how do we explain the intense feelings
and coercive posturing that occurred in Washington and elsewhere in reaction to
the Ninth Circuit Court ruling? How is a
pro-pledge appeal from the Federal Justice Department explained? The Pledge of Allegiance case is a matter of
litigation over the status of a government-endorsed ceremony. The role of the justice department is to
enforce the law as determined by the legislative process and confirmed by the
courts. It should not be involving
itself in a dispute like this, not on the “under God” side of the issue. What legitimate official interest could the
Justice Department possibly have in a controversy over the wording of the
pledge? The Justice Department is the
president’s hand. What happened to
protecting and defending the Constitution as is the president’s sworn
oath? Considering George Bush Junior’s right
wing agenda, Attorney General John Ashcroft’s vow to fight the Ninth Circuit
Court ruling was no surprise, but how does that justify using federal money and
employee resources to carry through?
In ferreting out
these “mysteries”, we cannot lose sight of one critical historical fact. In spite of all the pretenses about the
importance of “religious heritage“, religion has not always amounted to a
positive force for the common good. The
history of both the old world and the early American Colonies is fraught with
instances where the so-called “heritage” of religion was the underlying cause
of much oppression, social strife, and bloodshed. The very wording of the Constitution in its articles
and amendments is rather indelible historical proof. This nation’s indebtedness
to “religious heritage” is limited and provisional at best. The real debt of gratitude belongs to the
Framers of the Constitution and to the brave men and women who subsequently
gave the blood of their lives to preserve, protect, and defend the sacred code
of freedom that the Constitution embodies.
We cannot, must not allow this nation’s sacred heritage to be subverted
by idolatrous indulgences in archaic and exclusionary religious ideology.
The biblical
theocrats dearly want to extinguish all knowledge of their religion’s negative
impact on history. They want us blind to
the historical reasons why the Constitution forbids government entanglement
with religion. They endeavor to convince us that their deity and dogmas are the
sole reason the Nation has any worthy existence at all. One of the most salient contemporary myths
they peddle is that the “under God” ideology won the cold war and thus
delivered us from the evil specter of the communism. Undoubtedly, communism is
an adversary to the ways of capitalism and democracy and to civil and religious
freedom. Undoubtedly also, communism did
infiltrate twentieth century America to some degree and it was an ideological
tool of foreign powers. Still, it does
not follow that our national ideology of civil and religious freedom was
somehow more in jeopardy from communism then it was from the totalitarian
agenda of biblicalism. In the final
analysis, the only difference between communism and biblicalism is that the
former intends to extinguish religion altogether, while the latter intends to extinguish
all religion other than itself.
Properly enforced,
the Sixth Article and First Amendment are guardian defenders against either
eventuality. Subversion of the
Constitution was never required to defend against communism, no more than it
was to defense against Nazism. It’s a
fear mongering theocratic snow-job to suggest otherwise. Like the Second World War, it was the
fundamental national values of liberty, equality, and justice, including
religious freedom that united the Nation and saw us through the Cold War. Stated bluntly, there is absolutely nothing
democratic or pluralistic about biblicalism.
To the contrary, it is the antithesis to both. During the cold war, the need to defense the
Nation and its sacred secular ideals from the divisive encroachment of yet
another totalitarian movement was real.
Even so, it did not justify a theocratic sacking of our government while
the nation turned to the task of defending its legitimate interests against the
Soviet Union.
Intense lobbying
during the 1950’s from the Knights of Columbus, a catholic lay organization,
eventually brought the “under God” pledge into being. When President Eisenhower signed the bill
that sealed it in federal statute, he was tragically in error to claim that it
would provide the Nation with “spiritual tools” that it allegedly previously
lacked. What it did do is inflict an
insidious form of damage on the spiritual and intellectual integrity of the
Nation. Hand in hand with the creation
of the “under God” pledge came the 1950’s “red scare” witch-hunts led by
Senator Joe McCarthy. This amounted to a
tragic history of many loyal Americans blacklisted and ruined. Their lives were
ruined just because they knew someone of proven or suspected communist
leanings, or because they wouldn’t take the “under God” pledge, or otherwise
had religious or political views that ran counter to the maniacally autocratic
agenda of McCarthyism. As many others
have pointed out, we managed to press ahead rather well and win the Second World
War on the strength of a religiously neutral pledge and thus without recourse
to a government mandated supplication under a monotheistic idol. All this accomplished in spite of the
Vatican’s less then sterling politics during the Nazi rise to power. It is also notable that Washington in the
grip of “God” managed to entangle this nation in an ill conceived decades-long
and extremely costly crusade in Vietnam.
It resulted in the worst military defeat in our history. Now, forty years later there is the additional
issue of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center and all the various underlying events all played out under the specter
of the monotheistic overlord.
PART THRE E
Particulars